Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“The Neko,” he says, wearily. “I know where it is. I’m going to go get it.”

Elisa gives one short, curt nod.

Billy remembers the route: the long avocado corridor, the brick stairwell, the room with the file boxes. But when he gets to the room where the Neko should be, and opens the door, he sees that it is gone. The sawhorses are there, the chalk marks on the floor, but the Neko itself? MIA, or AWOL, or something.

He makes himself undergo the effort of thinking. He stands there, naked and bloody, and thinks.

He remembers Anton Cirrus’s duffel bag.

He stands in the dark, chalky room, breathing hard, and thinks about where Anton Cirrus might have gone. He considers where he, himself, ended up choosing to go when he was in the portal, with the opportunity to go anywhere. He went to work. Because that’s where you go when it feels like your whole life has been upended. At least there you know what’s expected of you. And work, for Anton Cirrus, is Bladed Hyacinth.

Billy doesn’t know where the Bladed Hyacinth office is, but he has a pretty good idea of how to find out.

He retraces his steps back to the Starbucks. Elisa is there, still applying pressure to Jørgen’s wound. Jørgen raises his heavy, hairy head and gives Billy a pained grin.

“Hey, buddy,” Billy says.

“Did we win?” Jørgen says.

“Not yet. But I’m gonna take care of it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jørgen says.

“You hang in there. In a couple of days we’ll be back home, drinking beers and getting high.”

He suspects that this will not, in fact, be the case. They belong to the Devil now, and Billy’s pretty sure that that means they’re going to spend the rest of their lives leashed up in Hell, to be brought out into the world every now and again when someone needs terrorizing. When someone’s throat needs rending. Nevertheless, he carries on, hoping Jørgen will be able to take some solace from the promise of this false future.

“One day we’re going to look back on all this and it’s just going to be a funny story,” Billy says. “You feel me?”

Jørgen winces, nods. “I feel you.” His eyes close again; his head drops slowly back to the floor.

Elisa looks up at Billy. “No luck with the thingamajig?” she says. “The cat?”

“Not really, no,” Billy says. “But I have a guess for where it is. I think I can get it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Elisa says.

“You okay here?”

“Uh, I guess. I mean, this situation is going to be a bitch to explain to the EMTs and I’m pretty sure the presence of a shot-up dude and a motherfucking corpse means that I’m going to have to be talking to cops for the rest of the night. Now, I can pass myself off as somebody who doesn’t know shit about shit but you know what would really help me out?”

“What?”

“Clothes.”

“Ah,” Billy says. “Right.”

He makes a passable kilt out of a discarded Starbucks apron and he goes out to the van, changes back into the orange jumpsuit, brings everybody else’s clothes inside. They can’t get Jørgen into his clothes without moving him, and although neither of them really knows the first thing about first aid they seem to recall that you aren’t supposed to move people who have suffered grievous injuries, so instead they fold his pants into a kind of pillow and stick them under his head, in the hopes of giving him at least a little relief.

Billy starts to wonder why the fuck the EMTs aren’t here yet, and then he realizes that he’s still half covered in incriminating forensics, so it’d probably be good for him to be gone before they arrive. If he can figure out where to go.

“I have to use the phone,” he says.

His memory hasn’t improved. Out of all the phone numbers he’s ever known, he can still only remember one. Fortunately it’s the one that he needs.

He calls the Ghoul.

“I heard tell that you had emerged,” says the Ghoul, when he hears Billy’s voice.

Billy processes this. “You talked to Anil?”

“Correct. He didn’t sound well, you know. And he made it sound like you were in — something of a bad situation.”

“It’s all right,” Billy says. “I’m just doing my job.”

Silence on the other end of the line. Billy gives it a second, but he can’t really wait. Forward motion. Forward motion is good.

“I need your help,” he says.

“Tell me. What can I do?”

“I need the address of the Bladed Hyacinth office.”

A pause. Billy can hear an unspoken why hovering over the conversation. But the Ghoul has never been able to resist a direct request to look something up on the Internet.

“One moment please,” he finally says. Billy can hear the Ghoul’s bony fingers clacking across a keyboard. “I’m pulling that up now.”

He gives the address to Billy. It’s also in Chelsea, close enough that someone could flee there on foot.

Bingo , Billy thinks.

He looks around for something he can use to write the address down but can’t find anything. Well. He’s sure he’ll remember. This one time he won’t get distracted and forgetful and fuck it up. That’s all I ask , he thinks. Just this one time .

“Well,” Billy says. “Thanks. And it’s good to hear your voice. But I should go.”

“Billy,” says the Ghoul. “One last thing.”

“What’s that.”

“You should call Denver. She’s been really worried about you since the reading last night. I think it would mean a lot to her if you gave her a call.”

“I don’t — I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Billy says. He imagines seeing Denver one final time, saying goodbye. Tries to imagine what function that would serve. For him, for her, for anyone. Comes up with nothing. Total blank. He’d rather she remember him as what he was than as what he is now. He’d rather she remember him as some goofy fuck-up who liked her movies, who found beauty in the movement of water, than as a killing machine.

He tries to come up with some way to explain this to the Ghoul, who has fallen into a pensive silence, but after a few seconds of trying out wordings in his head he just gives up and puts the phone back in its mount. It’s time to go.

He shakes a set of keys out of Jørgen’s pants. “I’m taking the van,” he says. Jørgen seems to have slipped out of consciousness and he doesn’t say anything.

“You’ll tell him?” Billy asks Elisa.

“I’ll tell him,” Elisa responds.

“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I guess it’s time to hunt a motherfucker down.”

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Billy remembers the address.

He’s not the best at urban driving, and he gets turned around in traffic and heads the wrong way for a few minutes, eventually needing to correct with an astonishingly brazen U-turn. But finally he gets to the right block. He double-parks and punches on the hazard lights, the universal sign for I’ll be back in a minute . Wresting a satanic world-destroying doodad from the clutches of a gun-wielding maniac does not seem like an errand that will conclude as tidily as, say, delivering a pizza, but he thinks it’s important to make the occasional gesture in the direction of optimism.

The building that houses Bladed Hyacinth is a three-story thing, squat and ugly. From the label on the intercom, Billy gleans that the offices are on the second floor, up a flight of stairs that he can perceive dimly through the smoked glass of the street entrance. He tries the door; it’s locked.